


Plain Forms

by Diminua



Series: Plain Forms [2]
Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Drabble, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-12-02
Packaged: 2018-04-30 08:23:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5156846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diminua/pseuds/Diminua
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was supposedly a quick drabble - 100 words on Artist Rimmer and stone that expanded..</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stone

Rimmer doesn’t really do stone. He’ll say it’s because sculpture is hard physical work - which he generally avoids if possible – but really it’s the permanency that scares him, the idea of creating something that will still be there when he’s gone, like the statues on his first ever trip to Earth with their perfect white marble limbs and folded wings, drapery of fabric clinging to cold shapely thighs, and beautiful, colourless, lifeless, eyes. 

The unchanging sterility of it all freaked him, as Lister would say, right out, and knowing that the sculptors were long since dead didn’t help much either.


	2. Paints

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another drabble - 100 words on Artist Rimmer and paints.

There is a particular glass Rimmer uses for rinsing the brushes and thinning watercolours – heavy at the bottom so it doesn’t tip up and ridged around so that if he picks it up absent-mindedly there’s a tactile clue before it gets as far as his lips. Mostly though he drinks tea, in a favourite mug, and eats biscuits without dipping them first, and skips things like water and proper meals, so he wouldn’t be likely to get confused. 

Most especially he likes what Lister thinks of as granny biscuits – pink wafers and bourbons – even though he never had a Gran.


	3. Brushes

Rimmer does his best with thinners and cleaners and careful storage but the fact remains that the moment new brushes are used they become imperfect. 

Kochanski suspects that there’s probably some important life lesson there about entropy, but she doesn’t want to inflict it any more than Rimmer wants to hear it, and frankly, if he can cope with Lister (who, however much they both love him, remains pretty much chaos personified) he can probably cope with the fact he will never, ever, ever, get the bristles of a used paintbrush back into the perfect point they made when new.


	4. Pens

The fancy pens and permanent inks are for maps and finished work, but rough sketches – the pattern of brickwork or the loose shape of a crowd - are generally just done in red and blue ballpoint. Four matching retractables with hatched silver barrels and squared off pocket clips, red and blue plastic trim at top and tail to indicate the ink colour. 

Refills for these pens, still in their plastic packaging, are kept tidily away with an elastic band around them in the same drawer as his spare razorblades and nail scissors and small sachets of something called ‘sensual touch glide’.


	5. Metalwork

It’s Lister, not Rimmer, who has a natural affinity with metal, but Lister shapes it for purpose, not art, only reinforcing Rimmer’s idea that it’s not his sort of material.

You have to deal with it, obviously, if you’re living in a miles-long clenched red fist of iron where simple things like the air you breathe and the water you drink are only made possible with hundreds of miles of cables and circuitry, but he doesn’t have to like it or think it civilised. Regency France would be a much nicer place to live, assuming he had a decent patron.


	6. Pastels and Chalks

The twins lend themselves well to portraits in pastel, curving lines of chubby limbs and identical pouting smiles. Which is just as well because Bexley is incapable of holding a pose for longer than half a minute and Jim will start laughing as soon as Bex plays up. 

A medium that doesn’t have to dry between layers of colour, laid in sweeping lines on scrapbook paper, works nicely. Then when they’re a little older they can take a few sheets and some chalks (not pastels) to try it themselves. They’re neither of them good, but Jim is better than Bex.


	7. Clay

Clay is mud with pretensions, slick and pliable through wet fingers, ready to be moulded into tendril and alien forms. Rimmer enjoys playing with mud more than he’d like to admit. 

Lister, being Lister, tries to make plates and bricks and strawberry pots, and the twins bash out little houses of the sort they’ll never live in - chimneys and windows and angled roofs, and fat little frogs with holes so that they can sit on top of plant supports and stop Lister from taking his eye out. Kochanski helps with painting and glazing, but Cat is too fastidious for clay.


	8. Landscaping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 150 words (I can't get it lower) on landscaping.

Left to his own devices Lister would still grow flowers and fruit, but probably in simple plots just dotted around wherever things will grow. It’s Rimmer who plots on paper, marks out the ground, pictures perspectives, and changes his plans when practical considerations intrude – that greenhouses need light for example, or that Starbug has to have a landing spot with a clear run for take-off.

The result is a neat complex of circles and interlocking lines which could be inspired by classical Italian garden design or the domes and freeways of Io or, most likely, both, and if Starbug’s landing strip doubles as something to draw the eye outward and somewhere to kick a ball about, that’s all to the good.

It is not however a driving range with a convenient statue at the end for Cat to aim his golf balls at. Rimmer is very, very clear about this.


	9. Plaster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So this got away from me. 725 words on plaster.

It takes a long time to find what used to be Versailles, what with the shift in continents and the layers of muck and snowmelt. Even the databanks on the Wildfire are hopeless and it seems the curve of the river is lost forever to time. 

Lister is determined though. It’s the only place on Earth Rimmer wanted to see and never got to, and if it’s still there they will find it. 

There’s just ten of them in the reconnaissance team. Rimmer and Lister of course, the now teenaged twins, Kochanski, Kryten, a couple of the younger barely fledged cockroaches, one of Ace’s ‘useful people’, saved from some sort of supernova a few dimensions across – there’s a classification system for all those but Lister has never bothered to learn it – and an older cockroach, here to stop the younger ones getting lost on the long flight over. 

He starts scolding as soon as they catch the humans up – Rimmer doesn’t understand roach speech but the high pitch of the clicking noises can’t mean anything else, and Lister tells him later it’s because they’d already dug a pit eight feet deep without them, and humans are far more easily damaged so should have waited. 

The roach shuts up after a bit though, and Lister thumps him amiably on the thorax and whistles something low and placating. 

It takes another two days for them to actually find the edge of a broken wall, but once they’ve got some idea where they are they can start using the heavier machines (the twins and Lister love this bit. They don’t often get to break out the earth moving equipment) and dig down much more quickly. 

The corners of the building have fared better than the long galleries, and the little team eventually break in through a choked up window, lifting their lanterns above their heads to reveal a hot pink box of damask and dust, picked out with the glint of gold painted plaster. Rich mouldings that frame the ceiling and the faint, faded, frescoes that can barely be made out now. 

The pink walls are empty of course, the valuable paintings long since removed, along with the glittering chandelier that should grace the room, and any furniture it might once have had.

The internal doorways both appear to be sound, but Lister insists (cockroach protests aside) on going first into the next room. 

This is even more splendid, if less eye-searingly pink. White marble and cracked mirrors reflect the lamps back and light up a room rich in carved figures lavished with a thick yellow gold. Instead of a painting above the mantel there is a man on a horse, long curls tossed back over his shoulders as he tramples bodies beneath him. Some king, presumably, if not actually an Emperor. Left behind because his pale plaster image couldn’t be separated from the fabric of the building. 

‘I’d like to take a cast of some of the stuff in this room.’ Rimmer touches a finger gently to the nose of a man with a lion’s paws, made to look as if he’s pulling himself up behind the fireplace. 

There’s certainly plenty of material, thick ropes of plaster-gilt flowers that hoop across the ceiling, reminiscent of the simpler lines in the room next door but impossibly and absurdly more elaborate. Plaster swags and flags that drape the walls, and two men who flank the fireplace, each as gold as the girl in the Bond movie and shackled in place with golden chains. 

‘This place gives me the creeps.’ Jim catches sight of himself in one of the mirrors and pulls a face at his wide-eyed reflection. ‘I mean seriously, Uncle A.’ 

‘Three million years ago it was the beating heart of an Empire, and now it’s just..’ Rimmer tails off with a vague gesture. ‘You’re allowed to find that creepy.’ 

‘The Cat would think it was great.’ Bex scrubs the dust off a marble window frame, finds it green beneath. ‘All these shiny, shiny things. He should’ve come.’

‘Yes, and done some bloody digging.’ Kochanski complains, but Bex is clowning around now, mimicking the Cat’s body language and ignoring her. 

‘And this shiny thing is mine. And this, and this, and this shiny thing is mine.’

‘Bexley.’ She reproaches, but gently. He’s only trying to cheer them up.


	10. Wood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 200 words on wood.

Cockroaches are the easiest things in the world to carve and even if the first few come out more like Egyptian scarabs the sitters do seem flattered. 

Roaches have no real art of their own except a sort of singing, and pictures and maps are meaningless to them, but something they can run their feelers over and get a sense of in three dimensions is something they can understand. 

Of course Rimmer starts it, really, to quiet his own revulsion. He’s never particularly cared for insects, and least of all the kind that traditionally infest human dwellings, but the longer he really looks at one and tries to capture it, the more he sees how it differs from its fellows. Nuances of gesture and posture, the pattern and set of the wings. It becomes interesting trying to get that down, first on paper and then with his new found enthusiasm for wood carving. 

It must seem odd to the new humans who come in, but that’s their problem. These creatures are their colleagues in building the new Earth, worthy of commemoration in sculpture, and each one unique. Anyone unhappy with that idea can, as Lister eloquently points out, smeg off.


	11. Edible Glitter

If everyone has some sort of art in them then Lister’s is cake decoration, and on Kochanski’s wedding day, with twenty years of practice behind him, he excels himself. 

The three tiered monster is an absolute Gormenghast of icing sugar pinnacles and silver flags, and may just collapse under the weight of its own edible glitter before the happy couple get to cut it. 

Apart from that though he and Rimmer stay quietly in the background, drinking the fizziest of last season’s cider from fancy glasses and joining the dancing only at the end when the slow songs come on.


	12. Oils

Kryten, for reasons known presumably only to his programmer, can paint in oils. He’s not Rembrandt (neither is Rimmer if it comes to that) but he can capture a likeness and he seems to enjoy it. 

He’s also completely impervious to the reek of turpentine, and the small room on Blue Midget that he uses for his downtime – a cupboard really, with an easel hammered against the shelving – is practically poisonous with fumes. However coaxed, Kryten steadfastly refuses to use a bigger space. He’s already too embarrassed about indulging himself in something that isn’t mopping floors or tying up beans.


	13. Paper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 225 words on paper

Lister adores Christmas. Just adores it. Even his favourite film is a Christmas film for smeg’s sake. 

Rimmer doesn’t know if anyone ever had Christmases like that – chestnuts roasting on an open fire, nutcrackers coming to life – but he suspects not. Certainly none of Rimmer’s were. His foster parents were nice enough in a ‘tell us what you want and we’ll wrap it’ sort of way, but they didn’t take any pleasure in creating the ‘Christmas magic’ that Rimmer hears so much about. 

Still he lets himself be roped in, making paperchains and paper snowflakes, Christmas cards and papier mache stars and long lines of paper angels holding hands. 

Come New Year's day they’ll burn the lot and, perverse as it no doubt is, Rimmer enjoys that day more than all the rest. Just feeding the greenery and frippery into the firepit and raking over the embers so that they can toast marshmallows and hot chocolate and that disgusting berry wine that no-one wants to drink unless it’s mulled. 

It’s not that he hates Christmas as such, but just a few weeks of madness; living in a green and red draped room, listening to seasonal songs with far too many bells and hideously inane lyrics, is enough. Just right, really, even if only because it reminds him what he has the rest of the year.


	14. Wax

The first lot of wax from the beehives is so soft it can be broken up in a warm room just with fingers and warm water to sit it in, honeycombs collapsing and cracking inwards as it’s rolled between the palms, the sweet improbable scent of it subtle but filling the room as it’s broken apart and dropped back in the water. They don’t know what they’ll do with it yet. Candles probably, or small sculptures, if Rimmer can find a way to stop them melting to nothing on hot days. Wardrobe fresheners, Kochanski suggests, but that might encourage mice.


	15. Performance Art

Lister noticed straight off that the whole Ace thing was bit of an act, but it takes thirty years of knowing the real Arnold Rimmer before he twigs that it’s not just an act, it’s an ongoing part, like James Bond.  
In a way it’s a clever piece of art, and isn’t that just typical? Doesn’t that make so much more sense than Ace ever being Rimmer’s real personality?  
It’s horrible though, really horrible, because why does anyone decide to spend his life as a fake? Just how badly must all those other Rimmers need to prove themselves a hero?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from a quote by Roy Lichtenstein 'Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms'.


	16. Pictures for this fic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pictures for Chapter 8 - Landscaping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was in two minds whether to post these (I'm sure they're not up to Rimmer's standard), but I've drawn them now.

Rimmer's Garden Plans 

 

and work table with work in progress

 

 


End file.
